Pecha Kucha

Preserve me from long-winded presentations! Why do many technical presenters feel the need to drone on endlessly about their fill-in-the-blank project without really getting much across to their audience, many of whom are falling asleep or wondering why they are there by the end of the presentation.

I recently listened to an Intel/Red Hat FCoE presentation which was painful in its execution. You can listen to it for yourself here. Obviously the two presenters had either (1) a hour to fill or (2) never heard of short presentation methods such as Pecha Kucha (chit-chat in Japanese) which is a presentation methodology in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each. That gives each presenter six minutes and 40 seconds to relay, in straightforward and accessible terms, highly technical or academic work.